7.9 and 8.8 Earthquakes in Japan

i pretty much know jack shit about how nuclear plants work, personally

same - really hoping that a lot of what i'm reading is the western media coming through with the hysterical hyperbole again :/

looks like it isn't hyperbole for once. shit has just gotten real.

From NHK: 'Explosion "heard" at quake-hit nuclear plant: Tokyo Electric Power Company says an explosion was heard at one of its nuclear reactors in quake-hit Fukushima Prefecture. It says several workers were injured."

oh lord

http://i.imgur.com/yQGkS.jpg

ooohhhhhhh lord

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg4uogOEUrU

from BBC live blog: Japan's NHK TV showing before and after pictures of the Fukushima-Daiichi plant. It appears to show that the outer structure of one of four buildings at the plant is no longer there.

I am shitting my pants here. :-( THis is fucking surreal. My parents. :-((

(I mean of course I fear for everyone, but I think of my parents first.)

Arrrgh ABC News 24 stop showing repeats of old current affairs shows

NZ television is abjecting its duties lamentably

Just calm down and wait, everyone. We don't even know what that building is, whether there's a reactor inside, etc.

We'll only find out what's really going on after it's happened. This whole "everything's under control, just keep indoors" thing is only what the public wants to hear, so there's nothing to be concluded from that right now, and every "something bad may have happened = something bad HAS happened!" thing in the news is just repeating every rumor they hear in case there's a scoop they'd otherwise be missing. Talking heads analyzing smokey pictures on a fuzzy TV image = filling the 24/7 schedule.

although it is now showing Burn After Reading. hmm.

god this is the most unsettling unfolding story i can remember though

Fingers crossed, stevienixed. Hope it's just steam/pressure/heat.

StanM is right. I'm just surprised at how little hard actual info there seems to be.

Japan's chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano has deeply weird earlobes

They make his ears look upside down

Japan chief cabinet secretary Edano: Confirms radiation leak at Fukushima plant
by Reuters_TonyTharakan at 3:07 AM

Per BBC World: "Japan's NHK TV says officials measured the level of radiation at the entrance of the Fukushima-Daiichi plant at 1529 Japanese time. If people are exposed to this level of radiation for an hour they'd receive the same amount of radiation they normally would in a year, the report says."
comment by Revenimus at 3:31 AM

My father just said he has shitake growing behind his ears. Always sees the funny side. :-)

seems like this reactor was built in 1971, almost 40 years old. hopefully newer reactors are more earthquake proof. but as something like this event shows, how can you ever be sure? I'm sure they thought that the reactor was earthquake-proof when they built it in 1971.

As I understand it the plant survived the earthquake unscathed, it's the lack of power to maintain the cooling of the reactor which is causing the subsequent problems.

bbc reporter in Japan getting increasingly agitated that the Japanese security teams are not letting them nearer Fukushima than 60km despite the safety cordon being 10km. FFS you idiots, why would they let non-essential people even head towards a potential meltdown? It's plain common sense.

Chatham House nuclear expert on Sky just now seems very calm downplaying this - 'you can tell by the picture this is something like what you get when you demolish a block of flats, it's of that order, not a meltdown'. Reassuring, but then he and I are both 8,000 miles away.

thing is, we expect a meltdown to look like some biblical occurrence with bells/whistles/sturm/drang, but really, what does one look like.

3.5yr old A was just asking what a zoonami was so we had to explain tectonic plates etc by rubbing sofa cushions together

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Syndrome

I think his point was that it looked like just the outer shell blowing, which if I picked up right is a casing to protect cranes that move equipment around

seems to be the line doesn't it?

I think a lot of people are using Chernobyl as a comparison but the technologies and processes are light years apart.

The China syndrome becomes fictional in the hypothesis of it boring a hole from the United States to China, or any other part of the world (the opposite side of the earth from the USA is the Indian Ocean, except for a section of northern Montana, Hawaii and sections of Northern Alaska, central Colorado, whose antipodes are Ile Saint-Paul, Ile Amsterdam, French Southern and Antarctic Lands, northern Namibia and Antarctica, respectively)

wikipedia cutting right to the point

antipode of Fukushima = just off coast of Uruguay fwiw.

Fukushima wind forecast for today and tomorrow, WSW at 5 mph and subsiding. The towns outside the 10km exclusion zone in that direction are Koriyama and Sukagawa, and little else til the Sea of Japan.

A pity they couldn't or didn't start one of the undamaged reactors, say #6, to provide emergency coolant circulation for #1 and #2.
BTW, more modern boiling water reactors have don't need external power for their coolant loop. They just gravity dump neutron absorbing solution (like the aforementioned borax) in.

Always keeps some spare diesel generators around, Tokyo Electric Power Company. The forensics here will be interesting.

Reuters Reuters Top News
FLASH: Serious damage to reactor container at nuclear plant unlikely - Kyodo quoting Japan nuclear agency

I'm actually more worried about the crew that are trying to fix this. There aren't that many people trained in the mechanics, and moreover loss of access to valves/machinery covered in debris will make things more difficult.

Just speculating, but if things get dire and they lose all coolant they could just spray the pressure vessel down with seawater. Steel doesn't conduct too well, but it might be enough to keep the bottom where the fuel/supports etc dripping onto below the steel's melting point.

Re: usage of disael generators:

"Three of Fukushima Daiichi's six reactors were in operation when yesterday's quake hit, at which point they shut down automatically and commenced removal of residual heat with the help of emergency diesel generators. These suddenly stopped about an hour later, and this has been put down to tsunami flooding by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)."

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Battle_to_stabilise_earthquake_reactors_1203111.html

Er, *diesel

From that same article:

"A seriously injured worker was trapped within unit 1 in the crane operating console of the exhaust stack. Breathing and a pulse could not be confirmed, Tepco said as it considered a rescue. At unit 3 one worker is known to have received a radiation dose of 106 mSv."

jesus it's only march

Quake moved Japan coast 8 feet; shifted Earth's axis
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/12/japan.earthquake.tsunami.earth/index.html

^music on that video is very creepy

The whole-body exposure threshold for acute hematopoietic syndrome or "radiation sickness" is 500 mGy. A dose of ~3,000 mGy produces an acute gastrointestinal syndrome that can be fatal without major medical intervention, and a dose of ~ 5,000 mGy is considered the human LD 50 / 30, that is, the lethal dose for 50% of the population in 30 days, even with treatment.

That worker may get to go home. At Chernobyl they instructed Army draftees with brief instructions and then had them run into the highest radiation zone do their task, and run away, rotating through 1000s to minimize the dose any individual faced.

didn't play the video til after i posted, but came back to say the same. weirdly inappropriate, imo.

Four trains still unaccounted for. Jesus.

BBC coverage doing its bullshit 'repeatedly saying fuck all' broadcasting right now.

More weirdly inappropriate tsunami soundtracking (video from 1983)

xpost

Yep. I had to turn to Sky News where they are inexplicably overdubbing destruction sound effects on their rolling disaster porn footage and cutting to moonpig.com adverts every couple of minutes. Decided BBC was preferable.

Man, TV news sucks during important events.

"Do I know what's going on? No, but I'm here for the next 6 minutes so I'm going to talk anyway."

I've been glued to the Metafilter thread - don't know if it's been posted here but there seem to lots of fairly knowledgable people / Japanese speakers.

They're adding boric acid or sodium polyborate in seawater to the containment vessel. They pretty much could have killed the reaction at any point with this, but as far as I can gather avoided this, as it will foul the reactor for future electricity production.

I'm struggling to imagine myself in this picture, the scale is just mind blowing.
http://d.yimg.com/a/p/ap/20110312/capt.63cc7b50979c4ca0bbd30f0f84ff0999-63cc7b50979c4ca0bbd30f0f84ff0999-0.jpg?x=400&y=266&q=85&sig=Hg2vbf6mWBePIsPg9PqgtA--

http://img858.imageshack.us/img858/9944/americans.jpg

http://img858.imageshack.us/img858/9944/americans.jpg